What are some of the main problems with safeguards?
Numerous problems exist with the safeguard policies, including the following:
- The policies often fall short of leading international rights and standards the could provide stronger protections to affected communities.
- The policies do not cover the entire range of social and environmental impacts caused by Bank-financed projects
- The policies apply only to Bank investment lending operations but not structural adjustment programs (which the Bank now calls "development policy lending").
- The Bank and borrower often do not comply with all of the policy provisions.
"Safeguards" and policy lending
Development policy lending - the Bank's new name for structural adjustment loans - may cause significant social and environmental impacts. Deflecting calls from civil society to apply rigorous social and environmental review requirements to its policy lending, the Bank adopted a vague operational policy (OP 8.60) that leaves it largely up to Bank staff to determine how extensively to examine potential impacts of proposed policy loans. The policy requires the Bank to determine if policy lending will cause "significant poverty and social consequences" or "significant effects on the country's environment, forests, and other natural resources." If such impacts are likely, the Bank is to assess how well a borrowing country's own laws and regulations will reduce such adverse effects and is to propose how any shortcomings are to be addressed. The policy fails to provide more specificity, and does not require the Bank to avoid severe impacts.
The absence of more rigorous "safeguards" for policy lending does not mean that civil society must remain silent about the consequences of bank-supported reforms on people and environment. Citing Bank violations of other internal policies, such as those regarding supervision and poverty reduction, activists have raised concerns and filed complaints about policy loans to the World Bank's Inspection Panel. To access a complete set of the World Bank's internal policies governing its operations, visit the Bank website.
Not Bound by Human Rights?
The World Bank is not a formal "party" to international human rights conventions, and thus feels that it does not hold specific human rights obligations, even though nearly all its member governments are signatories to the main rights conventions. Civil Society groups and academics have been challenging the Bank to formally recognize its human rights obligations as an international organization and to uphold human rights in its lending operations.